Hi,
I am the maintener of karamba in Debian. This mail is to present karamba
packaging into Debian.
Presentation of Karamba*
------------------------
apt-cache show karamba:
Karamba is a KDE program that can display a lot of various information
right on your desktop. Karamba uses the same "fake" transparency effect
that e.g., Konsole can use.
For the moment karamba development is divided in 3 differents parts :
karamba:
(http://www.efd.lth.se/~d98hk/karamba/)
This is the official karamba which is in Debian. For the moment the
development is frozen.
Superkaramba:
(http://netdragon.sourceforge.net/index.php?page=SuperKaramba)
This is a fork of karamba. The developer is very active. The major
enhancement compared to karamba is the support of python. Most of the
best eye candy themes are developed for it.
Karamba-rss:
I've see a mention of it on karamba.sf.net, but can not say anything
more :(
Now a project is started on sourceforge (karamba.sf.net) which aim is to
unify all karamba stuff. For the moment nothing appears to be done.
Karamba in Debian
-----------------
For the moment only the original karamba is in Debian (version 0.17).
Since this version is currently frozen, I don't expect to see new
version of karamba within a short period of time.
However, as I said before SuperKaramba is in active development, and an
unification project was started. So I hope that there will be a merge of
all karamba projects. But for the moment this is incertain.
So I will not package SuperKaramba and discourage anybody to do that
officially (I see an unofficial package of SuperKaramba for the moment :
I hope it will satisfy you !) This is for two reasons :
First, the situation evolve rapidly, and maybe all karamba projects will
merge in a few time. So there is no need to have two (or more) packages
since, 1 (or more) will certainly have to disapear...
Secondly, I intend to continue packaging karamba and related stuffs.
Therefore I intend to package the unified version, and karamba themes.
(a package per theme ?)
Suggestions for karamba upstream
--------------------------------
For the moment there is a lot of themes. I hope there will be an archive
which will contain all themes. This would be more easy to package. More
important I think that themes should be put in a specific directory.
This would prevent some configuration stuffs for themes, and will permit
an unified management of themes. (maybe /usr/share/karamba/themes)
On top of that there should be a ~/.karamba directory where the user can
personalize themes.
This will enable to make karamba looking a litte bit more professional
:)
I think I will suggest this to upstreams after receiving your opinions !
Don't hesitate if you have questions or comments.
Thanks.
PS: I am now moving to France (the 8th) and I will then made a trip
Austria. So don't be surprised if I don't give response immediately. I
hope that when I come back all version will have merged !
--
Jean-Michel Kelbert